How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → conferences & gatherings → 15th International Conference on War Tax Resistance & Peace Tax Campaigns

Some links from here and there…

• Nicaraguan tax resistance leader Irlanda Jerez was released from prison as part of a government amnesty of political prisoners in the run up to negotiations with the opposition. Jerez says she was drugged, tortured, and sexually assaulted while in prison, and that her home was sacked and her family attacked by government-aligned paramilitary forces soon after her release. Her children are now refugees. Torture, arbitrary arrests, and repressive brutality are frequently relied upon by the Ortega regime, amounting to “crimes against humanity,” according to Amnesty International. She has renewed her call for mass civil disobedience. “We’re ready to pay any price necessary to free Nicaragua.”
• The 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns is scheduled for late this year in Edinburgh, Scotland.
• The international human revolt against the traffic-ticket robots continues, with new attacks in France and Australia in recent weeks.
• Residents of Faradje, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are threatening a tax strike to pressure the government to take action against the incursions of Wodaabe nomadic cattle-herders from neighboring South Sudan into the land they use for agriculture.
• In the United States, individual taxpayers paid $93 billion more in federal income taxes last year than the year before. “Interestingly, that number stands close to the tax break amount that corporations received from the TCJA in 2018. Last year, big businesses paid $91 billion less in taxes than they had in 2017, prior to the new law’s passage.”

In other news…

• An international conference on war tax resistance is planned for later this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. It will also be the occasion for the general assembly of Conscience & Peace Tax International.
• The war on traffic-ticket-generating radar cameras continues, with several destroyed by rebels in France using fire and spray paint, and another destroyed by an accident it contributed to in Germany.
• Facebook has decided it will ban advertising that discourages people from voting. This should go to show that censorship is of course going to be practiced on behalf of the already powerful (who have the power to censor) and against unpopular heresies. But, you know, polite liberal golf claps is about all I hear.
• A poll of expatriate U.S. citizens showed that many are contemplating renouncing their U.S. citizenship, largely because of the tax (and onerous tax reporting) burden.
• Businesses in Pakistan are on strike to protest a sales tax increase.
• An IRS building in Kansas City, Missouri was shut down by a hazmat team because of “a brown substance on a package” discovered by an employee.

In other news:

• One of the tools the IRS uses against tax scofflaws like myself is to file a federal tax lien in the local court system of the scofflaw. This puts creditors and the local legal system on notice that the IRS intends to step in and assert its rights to seize money. This can make it difficult to get credit, and also makes it easier for the feds to seize anything awarded by the courts in lawsuits, probate resolution, etc. However (and this is where it gets interesting and newsworthy), filing a lien costs money. And the IRS thinks several California counties are charging them too much, and so they have started to refuse to pay. In response, some counties are refusing to process the IRS liens. Alas, this filing fee, and the standoff between the bureaucracies, also applies to paperwork to release a previously-filed lien. So this doesn’t always work in the scofflaw’s favor. Here’s some news coverage:
  • Marin Independent Journal
  • The Press Democrat
  • SFGate
• War tax resister Larry Bassett was interviewed on the Parallax Views podcast. Bassett is the subject of the recent documentary film The Pacifist and is responsible for the largest known individual act of war tax resistance, in terms of the amount of dollars resisted at once.
• Another Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report points out that reduced IRS resources means collapsing tax enforcement capability. “As more taxpayers experience little to no consequences for non-filing, the long-term impacts may include potential erosion of the voluntary compliance rate.”
• Via a review by Ariel Jurow Kleiman of Marjorie E. Kornhauser’s American Voices in a Changing Democracy: Women, Lobbying, and Tax 1924–1936, I learned of a 1935 “Meat Strike” meant to protest New Deal-era taxes on meat processing by boycotting meat purchases. The offensive tax was eventually thrown out as unconstitutional.
• The IRS issued an update to its estimate of the “tax gap” (the difference between how much tax people are supposed to pay and how much they do pay). The upshot is that they think little has changed: people pay about 84% of what the agency believes they owe. However, the last time I looked at the details of one of these “tax gap” reports, I noticed a lot of hand-waving, guesswork, and extrapolation, and only a little empirical data collection, so I would recommend taking these numbers with a grain of salt.
• More attacks on traffic ticket issuing radar cameras — in France & Italy; Mexico, Germany, and France; and France again. Revenue from the cameras is only half of what the government had hoped for and budgeted for in France this year, and the government has had to divert some of that money to installing more heavily-fortified cameras.
• The simple home of war tax resistance legends Juanita & Wally Nelson in Deerfield, Massachusetts has been restored as a “living memorial” to the inspirational couple.
• The 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns will be held November 28 through December 1 in Edinburgh. The last such conference was held in 2013 in Bogotá, Colombia.

In other news…

• If you’re a Facebook user, you can visit the Facebook page of Conscience U.K. and can view videos there from the 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns that took place earlier this year.
• Corruption in traffic-ticket generating red light cameras has gotten bad enough in Illinois that the state comptroller’s office said as far as it’s concerned the fines are optional and it will not enforce them against victimized drivers.
• Meanwhile, in France, Washington D.C., and Malta drivers have attacked and disabled ticket-issuing traffic cameras in recent weeks.

Some recent links from here and there…

• The journal Taxation features an article by Helen Thornley on the “Impact of the Women’s Tax Resistance League”.
• Some 30-year-anniversary remembrances of the struggle against Thatcher’s poll tax are appearing, including:
  • Today in London riotous history, 1990: local anti-poll tax demo erupts, Brixton (past tense)
  • Police officers from all over the county were called to poll tax protest in Southampton (Daily Echo)
• Erica Leigh reports back from the International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns last year in Scotland.
• Deborah White of Ukiah, California, has gotten fed up and has decided to stop paying federal income tax. She declared her tax resistance in a letter-to-the-editor of her local paper.
• More recent attacks on traffic ticket radar cameras in France and Belgium.

In other news:

• A report on the 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns has been published.
• The National Front of Catalonia is skeptical about the calls to tax resistance coming out of the Council for the Republic, noting that it had failed to stand behind tax resisters in the past who had responded to such calls. Essentially: Catalan patriots took the tax resistance seriously, but their politicians only meant it rhetorically. In addition, the call for resistance seems to have been an eleventh-hour afterthought, being issued just as tax returns were coming due, and too late for most taxpayers to prepare the groundwork for effective resistance.
• The number of people renouncing their U.S. citizenship is shooting up again. Each of the first two quarters of 2020 have had more official expatriates than any other quarter since record-keeping began (however there were unusually low numbers in the last two quarters of 2019, so this may be an artifact of some glitch in the bureaucracy). This in spite of the fact that the U.S. now charges thousands of dollars to people who want to relinquish their citizenship.